Looking from Canada to the United States, across Niagara's Horseshoe Falls

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Liberal monopoly health care cuts are NOT 'anecdotal'!

Paul J. Henderson wrote in “Time Out for Liberals; Local seniors say program cut devastating”, (The Chilliwack Times, August 14, 2009):

“Charlotte Blair doesn't mince words when it comes to the Fraser Health Authority's decision to slash funds that pay for a seniors program she attends five days a week."I don't know why they are doing this," the 67-year-old told the Times Thursday. "A lot of people are hurting."But she saves her toughest words for Chilliwack MLA John Les who has defended the cuts to a program that Fraser Health says isn't directly related to health."Oh baloney," Blair said. "I don't believe in that garbage. This is not right. If they close that down, a lot of people are going to go downhill and they are going to die."On Aug. 5, Fraser Health notified the Chilliwack and District Senior Resources Society they would no longer receive the $77,000 that helps pay for the Time Out seniors day program.The program is popular with seniors, many of whom would be shut-ins if not for the card-playing, dancing, exercises and outings they participate in.Society president Al Hunt said this money is an essential part of the $122,000 budget and effectively cancels the Time Out program, which is relied upon directly by about 90 seniors and indirectly by 800 others."There are going to be about 90 seniors that have no place to go," Hunt said. "It may not seem like a big deal to a lot of people but to the people participating in the program it's a huge deal. It's the difference between having a life or not."Hunt said letters were sent out to MLAs Barry Penner and John Les about the cuts. People from both MLAs' offices responded asking what the program was all about, something that baffled Hunt."[Les] is not new in town," he said of the former mayor. "The program's been running for 16 years and the City of Chilliwack has been a strong supporter."Adrian Dix, the NDP health critic, was in Langley Tuesday, challenging Fraser Valley Liberal MLAs to fight for seniors' programs just axed by the regional health authority. Programs were cut in Chilliwack, Langley and White Rock."These are the programs that keep people out of acute care," Dix said. He accused the Liberals of hiding the pending cuts during the spring election campaign.About 150 people showed up to a meeting in Chilliwack on Tuesday morning to protest the cuts.Blair was there with her son and she said the announcement reduced her to tears, something she didn't want to do in front of her son."We're going to fight this as long as we can," she said. "They should leave this open. . . . Some are older than I am; over 80, some are over 90. We need this."

*

Liberals are cutting health care in British Columbia in the same fashion as Liberals are cutting health care in Liberal Liar Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario.

The problem is, they are stoically, unreasonably - possibly criminally - forcing patients to live in their despotic, no-other-choice monopoly WHILE they carry out these cuts. Patients have no other choice - which is why the States become an option for some.

This is right out of the Ontario playbook of Dalton the Liar McGuinty. No wonder Obama said (again) in Montana on Friday that his health care reform is NOT going to resemble Canada’s!

By the way, why aren’t all the smug leftist-single-payer-pushers denouncing Charlotte Blair, the way they are attacking Shona Holmes – who fought and survived Dalton McGuinty’s “cruel game” (as Ontario’s ombudsman called it) of a health monopoly in Liberal Ontario? Blair and Holmes, as well as many other victims of Canadian health monopolism, symbolize just another facet of the same argument: the danger of forced reliance on a state-run health monopoly.

When Blair says: “If they close that down, a lot of people are going to go downhill and they are going to die,” why are leftists not denouncing her as an un-Canadian fearmongerer?! She dared openly criticize the government - ban her! Marginalize her! Brand her a heretic!

We've seen all the numerous smug attacks on Shona Holmes by rabid leftists, who can't bear to see their wet-dream of a socialist single-payer health Utopia discredited by a real-life example of single-payer failure.

Another attack on Shona Holmes was Tarek Fatah's (on co-host Michael Coren's CFRB radio show, Aug.12, 2009) smug dismissal, using the left's favourite, and by now tired, derision of Holmes' experience as "anecdotal". Fatah also accused her, without substantiation, of being paid by the always-nefarious drug companies! Put on the tinfoil hat, Tarek.

Fatah was also disdainful of the Shona Holmes ad played in the U.S., saying something along the line that no one was there to respond; but, the Liberal government had TWO YEARS TO RESPOND, Tarek, publicly, right HERE in Ontario (Liberal MPP Jim Bradley has known about the Shona Holmes case for years!): the Liberals didn't bother to respond! No one cared until the ad made it to the States - suddenly every ignorant Yank single-payer-pusher was an expert on Ontario's monopolist-run health care! Jim Bradley and his Liberals said NOTHING about the Shona Holmes case for two years - and now, if asked, they have the old line ready; 'sorry, we can't comment, as it's before the courts'!

B.C. Liberals, as the Ontario Liberals, are now typically, predictably, cutting health care in their no-patient-choice monopoly...

Your surgery has been cancelled: so what? You're just a goddam "anecdote" as some Yank Obamascare-deluded single-payer-pusher, or a typical Canuck socialist, will declare. How dare you want health care when you need it? We'll decide what you need from what you want, and we'll decide when - or if - you get it! Tommy Douglas said so! [FLICK Tommy Douglas and the horse he rode in on!]

The argument which is not being made, but should be, is that single-payer, non-competitive health monopolism is not the answer to Canada's system of health universality. We need a different, hybrid, private-parallel system, such as in Europe. This kind of system should have been phased-in through all-party agreement in every province years ago. But the political, nationalistic chest-beating always devolves into who is 'more Canadian', who is an 'enemy of Canada', and who will 'save medicare for Tommy Douglas'.

The American system is not a model for us; but neither is the failing model which our monopolist provinces still stubbornly cling to today; a model which still must resort (to its smug supporter's chagrin) to export Canadians to the States for treatment when single-payer monopolism fails to deliver here.

Kevin Libin (in "Private health: our third rail", National Post, Aug.15, 2009; see: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1894803) wrote of Brian Day saying "that that any suggestion of introducing any privatized reform is caricatured into a call to end universal health care forever. "The strategy that proponents of the status quo have used is to present the Canadian public with two options, American or Canadian health care, and at least until Obama came along, anything American was evil," he says. "I don't know a single Canadian physician who would like Canada to have an American-style system." "

As we all know - Ontario's McGuinty Liberals were the poster children for that tactic. It was always deceptive 'American style two tier slippery slope credit card lookit Bush' fearmongering with them! The Liberals regularly perpetuated this caricature, on the federal and provincial level.

Libid writes: "...surveys regularly find that the majority of Canadians are just fine with private insurance, and private hospitals, provided everyone is guaranteed access to health care when they need it. Yet raising the idea is perilous for a politician. When former Alberta premier Ralph Klein announced in 2000 a plan to allow the province to contract out major surgeries to private, for-profit clinics, he was, predictably, accused of sneaking in "American-style," "pay or pray" health care; his plan to allow patients to pay for "enhanced" services in 2005 met the same outrage, despite getting a green-light from Ottawa. "You mention health care reform and people's hair lights on fire," Mr. Klein lamented."

Yep - Klein and Harris (what the hell: Chaoulli also) were the scapegoats for Ontario's smug Liberals - Liberals who have caused more damage to health care than Harris ever supposedly did! Liberals even attacked their own federal health minister, Pierre Pettigrew...

Ontario Liberal MPP Jim Bradley regularly bashed the American system whenever he could; the deceptive insinuation being that this was the only alternative, and therefore, that his Liberal monopoly was somehow better. Liberals and socialists still try to use that tactic, although being Obama lovers, they now are at a slight loss as to how to kindly bash the U.S. system!

... "Reactionary Liberal response to healthcare reform is sadly predictable, but not new. Why should the right of the individual become secondary to the fiat of the health-system? And why did Jim Bradley once say he hates doctors?

The St. Catharines Standard (Apr.21, 2001) editorialized on Liberal opposition to health reform as “bombast”, stating:

“The idea that reform is needed is a no-brainer. As currently constructed, Canada’s healthcare system serves as a black hole for public funds”. The Harris government said: “Responsible choices and tough decisions are needed not merely to sustain, but quite literally to save, Canada’s healthcare system”. Yet Jim Bradley pandered: “They’re looking for a way to impose a two-tier healthcare system with a good deal of privatization in it to save money.” The Standard pounced on Bradley’s tactical rhetoric as typical Liberal “fear-mongering”, pointedly noting Bradley’s use of the “Holy Trinity of catch-phrases designed to stifle any attempt at real reform – ‘two tier’, ‘privatization’, and ‘U.S. style’.”

That was in 2001, demonstrating a typical example of state-of-the-art-Liberal-two-tier-anti-American smearmongering. This is the typical kind of Liberal single-payer-pushing, status-quo-protecting garbage that has been regularly spouted in Canada for years. There's never a "debate" - you are instantly demonized when you question single-payer - the left simply anecdotalizes you and demeans you as they did with Shona Holmes.

Let's pretend for a moment that Liberal MPPs such as Jim Bradley had not been arrogant health care monopolists and patient-choice deniers; look at the substantive changes an open-minded Liberal government could have helped bring about, by being honest while in opposition, as well as in government. But, McGuinty's power-hungry Liberals have been duplicitous all along.

Jim Bradley, and the rest of McGuinty's scumbag crew of health care monopolists, have undeniably 'stifled health care reform' in Ontario - for years. Liberal MPPs such as Jim Bradley are directly accountable for what happened to Ontario patients such as Suzanne Aucoin, Shona Holmes, and countless others.

There was always a better way - but Ontario's Liberals, blinded by socialist ideology, chose to ignore reform: by, in a classic Catch-22 style, forcing even more failed health monopolism, since 2003, as a 'solution', when they clearly should have known better.

The taboo third rail should no longer be talk about seriously reforming monopoly heath care; we should also turn to another previously-taboo subject: should monopolist, single-payer-pushing-health-care-cutting politicians be held liable for manslaughter in patient deaths attributed to the failures of their own health care obligations?

If 'single-payer-universality-promising' Liberals want to practice forced-health-care-monopolism in Ontario, why shouldn't these same politicians be criminally held liable in each instance where their monopolism hurts or kills patients?

It's not enough for a smarmy Liberal just to say 'oh well... I had good intentions; the idea of a health monopoly Utopia just sounded SO great...'